The spread of humanism in fifteenth-century Italy was extraordinarily rapid and complete, so much so that it could instill an uncritical complacency in its adherents and practitioners. By midcentury, humanist Latin had become the language of the Roman Curia, and it soon became the language of peninsular diplomacy. Humanists filled positions in the bureaucracies of princely courts and city-republics, and they took jobs as teachers and secretaries in the houses of the powerful. While humanists kept alive the bogeyman of the unlettered scholastic, whose barbarous Latin threatened a return to an age of gothic ignorance, there were, in fact, few obstacles which might slow down their cultural and professional advancement. The way to a career in the clerisy now began in the grammarian's classroom, and the successful humanist rarely cared to question the assumptions of the literary and educational movement to which he owed his livelihood.

Renaissance humanism, it is generally agreed, emerged in the fourteenth century as an intellectual movement devoted to the study and imitation of ancient poetry and rhetoric. It was also dedicated to using literature to promulgate ethical values derived from a variety of classical schools and blended with Christian teachings in more or less convincing ways. Scholastic philosophy in its three branches of metaphysics, natural philosophy and logic was either avoided by and large by humanists or was subjected to an assortment of criticisms—especially dialectic and physics. Petrarch and Salutati are salient examples. There can thus be little ground today for confusing humanism and scholasticism, a tendency Paul Oskar Kristeller has so valiantly and persistently combatted.

In the period before Claude Paradin's Devises Héroïques (1551) and Paolo Giovio's Dialogo dell'Imprese (1555), our knowledge of the theory and use of devices is somewhat fragmentary. There are some well known cases: Maurice Scève's use of devices as a framework for his Délie, though he called them “emblesmes“; Rabelais’ device for Gargantua consisting of the Platonic androgyne with the motto “Charity seeketh not her own“; Erasmus's figure of Terminus and “Concedo nulli”. The author of the little known French version of the Penitencia de amor was probably concerned mainly with the religious and moral ideas which he develops at some length in his adaptation, but his second interest is clearly the fashion for devices, which he introduces and uses, together with some extensive colour symbolism, apparently to enhance the impact of his didactic additions.

For the study of early modern society, Renaissance art often provides an extraordinary means of exploring visually the values and assumptions, attitudes, and modes of perception of those who inhabited, mentally and materially, the world of traditional, preindustrial Europe. The work of Hans Baldung dit Grien (1484/85-1545), a Swabian painter, illustrator, and designer of stained glass, illuminates one of the most familiar and yet least understood aspects of this world, the mentality of those who believed that some women were capable of influencing a man's sexual nature by means of witchcraft.

In a series of prints and drawings executed between 1510 and 1544, Baldung portrayed various aspects of the alleged activities of witches. As contributions to the iconography of witchcraft, these Hexenbilder were without artistic precedent.